Is email support ever good support?

Lately I’ve been sending a crap load of emails to Xbox Live support and a bunch of emails to EA. Dear lord, sometimes I think email support was created just to make a place for unanswered problems to go. I can’t believe people get paid to answer them too! So far the recurring answer I’ve received from Xbox support is that ‘it is suggested that I call them.’ Apparently it is impossible to formulate speech into sentences on a computer monitor.

Out of the many emails I have sent to Xbox and EA I have only been mildly helped by EA during a live chat. Even though it only helped me a little it helped me a load more than sending hundreds of emails back and forth to Xbox. Even if one email helps, if I need more help with a problem I can’t reply to an email and I need to send another one and it won’t be the same person who wrote the last. Even if the same person does reply to another one of my emails they probably won’t remember because of the amount emails describing even more problems!

Even though email support is a load of crap I have to credit EA’s live chat. Even though it hardly helped me, the EA employee was really nice and he did try to help me and he did give me an answer that wasn’t ‘We suggest you call us, you’re problems will be resolved.’ I just hope they realise that they aren’t helping or even better, don’t make the game with retarded problems that could have been resolved before the release, like Halo in German!